Icebergs Big and Small
You know, I do love the brash ballsy-ness of Doctor Who. I love that it has no compunctions about killing people on Christmas, or evacuating her Majesty out of Buckingham Palace complete with corgi entourage, or having its Big Bad roll out on wheels and have an epic fight with a forklift. Sometimes DW indulges in this inadvisable cracktasticness and it's off-the-rails fantastic. But there's always the danger that these bonkers elements of supercharged crack-addled mania are just not going to mix up well together and the whole enterprise will fall on its bloated, self-important butt. Unfortunately Voyage of the Damned is one of those times.
I'm not the biggest fan of the straight-up disaster movie genre, the Towering Inferno/Poseidon Adventure cheesefest where the little band of quibbling survivors gets predictably whittled down amid flat wisecracks and falling debris. I was hoping RTD would do this genre with a twist, put a postmodern Doctor Who spin on one of the most stale adventure formulas. But VOTD really stays in the mold, with each member of the Doctor's party bringing their own sweet sob story to the board, and then becoming so instantly attached to each other that they sacrifice themselves in overblown spectacular fashion. It's such an ambitious thing to attempt in 70 minutes, and maybe with a slightly smaller scale disaster and a smaller cast, it could have worked. But as things stand, I found the attempts to ingratiate the audience to Astrid, Mr. Copper, the Van Hoffs, and Bannakafalata too transparent and manipulative. Almost as soon as the Van Hoffs have their sweet moment together, they're bumped off. Same for Bannakafalata. These could have been nice characters, but the pace of the adventure was so compressed that it was impossible to care. And when you're not completely invested -- in fact, when you're not completely and madly in love with your characters -- then all the huge, slo-moed, screaming death scenes as everyone TOPPLES INTO THE ABYSS play like the cheesiest things since, well, Last of the Time Lords.
What's amusing to me is that a lot of this adventure reminded me of End of the World, a far superior, smaller scale disaster story, complete with evil crew-killing robots, a glitteratti gathering sabotaged by a selfish villain, and a lovable character sacrificing herself for the Doctor. That story didn't bite off more than it could chew -- it was very closely wedded to both Rose's and the Doctor's emotional lives, it had some biting satire that didn't feel totally mean-spirited, and it was very funny. VOTD may pause for the occasional Alonzo/Three Questions/Time King of Galibee crack, but it's no romp. In fact, it's often completely joyless, and not in a very serious Human Nature sort of way, but in a flat, inelegant, tonally confusing mess of half-baked ideas.
What was the point of it all? That the Doctor can't save everyone, so he shouldn't pick favorites, shouldn't make promises? I can't really get behind this interpretation for several reasons. One is that I don't see what can be achieved by making this a lesson the Doctor needs to learn. It's one thing to challenge his God-complex, to question his right to judge his adversaries, to punish. But surely he should be trying to save the people who need saving? Maybe that actual verbal tick of his, the arrogant "I'll save you, I promise" thing can be dropped, but the message behind it is ALWAYS going to be a part of the Doctor's character. If he can, he'll save everyone. EVERYBODY LIVES. I find VOTD's haphazard articulation of this concept really difficult, because I'm not sure this particular hubris is a flaw that needs correction. The other Christmas Specials have pointed out more disturbing failings in the Doctor: The Christmas Invasion showed him hypocritically punishing Harriet Jones for taking a hard line in the protection of her people and Runaway Bride had Donna's extremely incisive rejection of the Doctor and her declaration that he sometimes needs someone to stop him. Those felt like very serious issues, and they hang over the Doctor's character to this day, and I hope the show will continue to wrestle with them in future. I'd like it if VOTD was trying to underpin and criticize the Doctor's holier-than-thou Lonely God thing, but if that was the intent, the episode really didn't do a good job of articulating the problem. Mr. Copper's line wasn't enough for me, because the story itself doesn't justify it. The Doctor getting worked up about losing people is understandable, his desire to save people isn't especially arrogant, and while having a yen for awestruck blonde women is at times eye-roll worthy, it's not a big enough crime to worry about the Doctor being a monster. "I can do anything!" is disturbing, but this isn't really an episode where the Doctor has overstepped his bounds. Genocide seems like a bigger problem to me than any of the disaster movie schlock-o-rama in VOTD. It's funny, because I love the Doctor's character in the new series, I'm fascinated by his layers of selfishness, egotism, emotional dependence, self-righteousness, his blindness, his immaturity, how morally adrift this wreck of a man is often revealed to be. But VOTD felt more like a load of explosive waffling than any new crisis point for the character.
There were a few pluses for me. I thought Astrid was very sweet, and while her fast characterization as a hungry-for-the-stars soulmate feels a wee bit lazy and rushed, she did have a few very nice moments, particularly her interaction with Bannakafalata and her first fetching a box before she lays a very old tradition on the Doctor. She was lovable, and what ruins her arc is really just the overamped, ludicrous way the ep handled her death scene. I mean come on, she died in a forklift versus cyborg-head-on-wheels deathmatch. That is just too cartoonishly wrong to be a great epic sobfest. I liked her poetic reconstitution as stardust, and the Doctor offering her a kiss all on his own, but I thought that moment, like every emotional beat in this episode, suffered from being overscored and oversold; a little subtlety would have gone a long way to making this actually heartbreaking. It's like the producers were afraid this moment would feel unearned, hence they needed to lavish it with bells and whistles and pointless noise in the hopes of covering up for a lack. That's never a good sign. Another plus was the corgis. I love corgis. I'm easy that way.
But hey, I remain an optimist. Doctor Who has suffered from weak patches before now, and I don't think it's done itself any permanent damage. VOTD is only a little iceberg. I have very high hopes for Donna and even for RTD, if he can only pull himself out of this self-consciously lazy funk he seems to be sat in.